The Gift

I give you my heart.

It is torn and bleeding.

You stuck your fist inside my rib cage, plucked my heart out and held my empty body on display. The blood dripped from your fingers and you made a mess of my clothes, left them sullen with stains the colour of red wine.

Soon my body will shut down. My vessels will collapse, my veins will run dry, my brain will grow numb, my skin will turn blue and my lungs will take a final gasp of air before they malfunction.

You couldn’t keep up with my tempo. My heart beat too wildly for your taste. I loved easily, in excess and without fear.

Your blood was full of poison. You couldn’t withstand my warm caress, my wordless flights into the great beyond, my joy that knew no bounds.

You scooped my aching core and  left my body out to rot.

I give you my heart.

It is torn and bleeding.

I have no use for it now.

Espionage

I like to watch her tall body and its tiny movements, the pores of her skin always alive, like ripples on a lake, as if she were tickled constantly by the wind and its tiny summer breaths.

I watch her quietly, her bare, exquisite arms, the dense flesh of her breasts, the cliff points of her nipples that peep through her bra. Her hair is outlandish, locks of hair twirling in the dark, their fiery ends causing ruptures in the air. She is not aware of me or her body. She continues her task at hand, her body and its tiny movements sifting through sun-dried clothes. Through a borrowed lens I watch her make a dance out of the simple chore of folding her skirts. She wraps her fingers around the fabric as if she remembers the precise moment she unfurled the layers of its flair and held her cunt on display to an unsuspecting him.

I spy with my sleuthing eyes something beginning with the letter ‘b’- back, her back, no, the small of her back that her blouse unveils for all the world to see. She has ripples there too, her pores blushing on the edge of the wind, like leaves. My fingers itch to touch the delicate roundness of her ass. I touch with my naked eyes, I marvel at the beauty of its ratio, its precise proportion to her luscious breasts. Her legs are long and fit. I spot the muscles of her calves as they move in communion with the rest of her body and its tiny movements; picking up her small pile of folded clothes from her unmade bed, treading the short distance to her wooden cupboard, putting them neatly into place upon a shelf.

If only she knew that clothes lose their meaning when they wear her, that she gleams through cotton, reveals so much more than she tries to conceal, that I know her body well already, in spite of all the clothes that adorn. I have studied its arithmetic, its intimate geography:

Breath of wind + Nuance of touch = the delicate ripening of her pores, goose bumps.

Two inches north from her resplendent buttocks lies her delta, her mound. I know her cartography; can trace historic passages that lie submerged on the surface of her belly. Most men may have stumbled upon them, accidentally, but would never have recognized the antique trail.

She has the wealth of ancient cities buried inside her cunt. If only she would let me dig, let me excavate, I would uncover her, would dance sprightly around her riches, would sift through her pile of jewels and tuck them quietly back into place, for future reference and mark the spot with an ‘X’.

Muse (For B, who tried to make a poem out of me)

I confess you grabbed me by my collar, shook the sleep out of my drifting body and left me altogether speechless, tongue-tied and clueless, wondering how I must reply.

I confess I am flattered a poet of your intensity should find such bludgeoning beauty in my insecure, black body, that you should be mesmerized by my smile, that you should drown in the murky depths of my eyes, that you are probably drowning still with no hope for salvation.

How must I rescue you from this poem you are making of me?

Confess, B, that I am but a figment of your creative ecstasy. A half truth, a bold, distorted fragment of the real, carved from malleable clay, fashioned by your crafty eyes that peer into the soul of all matter in their compulsive quest for poetry.

Confess, B, that I am but a poem inside your head, one that escapes syntax, simile, economy. A poem you must pursue because it drives you mad, possesses you, etches its essence all over your hungry, prophetic tongue and remains unattainable because you can see, believe, but can never touch, grasp, contain, own.

Confess, B, that I am but a vision inside your soul, a stark naked angel wandering the smoggy terrain of your prophecy, a morning vision that will vanish by noon, that is vanishing so soon, vanishing as we speak, slipping away softly, on tipytoes, when you are asleep, while your body is breaking into the seductive arms of some other product of ecstasy.

Confess, please, that it will vanish in spite of all your pleas, your eager appeals to patron saints of memory.

This is how it will unfold,

The Vanishing;

It will begin with the forgetting of the curve of my smile and will steadily swallow all the intent in my semi-passionate eyes. This will follow; the sound of my voice blurring into oblivion. You will try to make it reappear but will hear only the sound of your own voice paralyzed by poetry, screeching in the deafening stillness of night.

You will shriek at the sheer wonder of this pure poem you have made of me vanishing into obscurity, too exuberant to have been true, too real to have been imagined, so incredibly out of reach, so unreasonably ideal, so fucking beautiful it makes you want to weep.